Posts about Frontend Development

Frontend Development encompasses both design (theming) and user experience development. While smaller nonprofits may not have a complicated backend from a technical standpoint, every organization needs a frontend that engages users, both supporters and staff.

Media queries are a key part of responsive web design, because they control at what width (among other things) different CSS rules kick in.

“Breakpoint< makes writing media queries in Sass super simple,” say Mason Wendell and Sam Richard, creators of the extension to Compass<, and they’re right. It’s not surprising that we’d want them to present at Drupalcon, since design in Drupal, like web design everywhere, has been embracing responsive web design as a fundamental principle.

A new theming engine, Twig<, is coming along with DrupalDrupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) used for many complex nonprofit sites. Other examples of CMSes include WordPress, Joomla! and Plone. 8’s adoption of the Symfony framework. And it’s downright magical.

Instead of having theme functions that have to be overridden, everything becomes an (easy to read, easy to modify) template. Instead of having to figure out render arrays, themers can use consistent template variables. And instead of having insecure output, Twig sanitizes everything by default.

DrupalDrupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) used for many complex nonprofit sites. Other examples of CMSes include WordPress, Joomla! and Plone. is getting a switchboard operator. Module developers will be able to pass a string to a method called “announce” on the Drupal object and have that string read by a screen reader.

“Drupal 8 will be the most accessible version of Drupal yet,” declare J. Renée Beach and Wim Leers in their Drupalcon Portland session description<. When I spoke with J. Renée about Drupal 8 and the nature of working on accessibility, the passion for this work really shown through.

The big news at Drupalcon Portland is that, for the first time at a Drupalcon, we’re having separate frontend< and user experience (UX)< tracks. That means we were able to offer even more sessions targeted directly at frontend developers, and as the local track chair for frontend, I’m really excited about what we’ve ended up with!